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Tuesday, 12 June 2007 04:23 |
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Experiencing Training with NO Configuration Management.
My role as Configuration Management Engineer in our Training Production Group results in me continually checking that all the training that is produced by our group is strictly configuration managed in every sense. The courseware looks as if one person has produced all the courseware, with all presentations delivered using our Learning Management System (LMS)uses a common template, dependent on the curstomer's requirements, the font, format, style, language, acronym usage, etc, etc, are always the same. In other words the courseware produced by our company is always of very high quality.
As a member of the British Territorial Army, our Army's reserve, I have just attended my 15-day Annual Camp and as part of the training I received during this period I had to attend a 5-day course, mainly delivered using PowerPoint presentations that clearly had no configuration management at all. Each lesson looked unique, even if it obviously followed a previous lesson. Every instructor used a different style, the font often changed from slide to slide and when acronyms where used they were rarely broken down at any stage to explain the meaning of the acronym to those who weren't in the know. Not only did this prove a problem to me, with my educated eye for the configuration management of training, but most of the other students also commented on the obvious problems with the courseware. Some of the slides had far too much content and not only failed to present information in an easily assimulated form, but had so much information that they often bewildered the students and left them taking in no information at all from the slide, other than the subject appeared to be so complicated that it was beyond the comprehension of the student.
The lowpoint of the course was when our instructor started a lesson on "Reporting Objectives" with a PowerPoint slide showing the lesson title and his name. He then opened up a discussion on "Reporting Objectives" during which it was agreed by everyone that reporting objectives included key objectives like reports should be Accurate. The projector was then switched off by the instructor and he stuck a magnetic tile on the white board with the words "Reporting Objectives" on it and invited the students to tell him what the first objective was. One of the students stated the word "Accurate" The instructor nodded sagely and then invited the student to perhaps view the word "Accurate" another way, such as "Not Inaccurate". The befuddled student was somewhat taken back, but with a degree of resistance agreed with the instructor that a report should not be inaccurate. Having gained the student's agreement the instuctor the stuck up a magnetic tile under the "Reporting Objectives" tile, which read "Inaccurate". I joined in the general gasps of the students and like them pointed out that the magnetic tiles gave the strongest impression that Reports should be inaccurate, but we were informed by our instructor that we were looking to deeply into the message of the magnetic tiles and all he was trying to say was that reports should NOT BE inaccurate, in other words they must be accurate.
Instances like the above would not be allowed to happen in the courseware produced by my company. In the first place, our experienced couseware designers would never have allowed such negative training to have been produced, but even if one of them had blown a fuse and produced this, it would have been picked up in our Peer Review process and corrected at that point. Finally, the customer would have surely objected to the slide in his review of the courseware and it would have been corrected at that stage, before the courseware was ever delivered to a student.
I obviously offered some constructive criticism of the lesson at a convenient point, after the lesson, but I am not at all convinced that the instuctor, a member of the British Regular Armed Forces, really took on board my comments.
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